THE HOUSE

EORUM MEMORIÆ
QUI DOMUM ET ÆDIFICA VERUNT
ET SALVAM SERVAVERUNT
SACRUM

THE HOUSE

By

HENRY BORDEAUX

Author of “The Parting of the Ways,” “The Woollen
Dress,” “The Fear of Living,” “Footprints
Beneath the Snow.”

Translated by
Louise Seymour Houghton

Omne regnum divisum contra se desolabitur;
et omnis civitas vel domus divisa contra se
non stabit. —Matt. XII., 25.

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1914

Copyright, 1915, by
PLON-NOURRIT & COMPANY
Copyright, 1914, by
DUFFIELD & COMPANY

CONTENTS

BOOK FIRST

THE HOUSE

I
THE KINGDOM

“WHERE are you going?”

“Oh, up to the house.”

Put this question to little girls and boys that you see along the country roads, on their way from school or coming in from the fields, and you will get this answer.

Their bright eyes glisten like grass after a shower; their speech, unless they are timid, shoots straight out, like plants that claim all space to grow in undisturbed.

“Where are you going?”

They do not answer “home”; nor do they even say “to our house.” They say “the house.” It may be a wretched, tumble-down shed: all the same it is the house, the only house in all the world. Some day there will be others,—perhaps. But that is not so certain, after all.

Even young men and women, and quite grown persons, married folk, if you please, use the same expression. At the house they used to do this, at the house there was that. One might suppose they were speaking of their present house. Not at all; they are speaking of the house of their childhood, the house where their father and mother lived, and which they have not been able to keep, or the customs of which they have changed—it’s all one—but which in their memory is always the same. You quite understand that there cannot be two.

I was a school-boy then; oh, just a little primary school child, perhaps seven or eight years old,—seven or eight I think. I always said “the house” just as people say la patrie when they mean France. Still, I knew very well that there were people who called it by other names, names which sound grander to a child. The baby’s Italian nurse used to call it il palazzo, rounding her mouth for the second a, and letting the last syllable die gently away in a lingering whisper. The farmer who brought the rent, or more probably an instalment of it, or even a fowl of some sort, to encourage the master to have patience, would say the château, with several circumflex accents. A lady who came from Paris to visit us—you would know she was from Paris by the lorgnette which she carried—had given it the dignified title your mansion. And during the crisis of which I shall have presently to tell, any one might read on the humiliating bill that was posted on our front gate the words Villa for sale. Villa, mansion, château, palace, how colourless are all these majestic words, notwithstanding their fine sound! What was the use of tangling up the truth in words? “The house” is quite enough. “The house” tells the whole story.

It is still there: it has an ancient habit of being there. You would have no trouble in finding it—the whole country knows the Rambert house, because our family has always lived in it. It has been carefully repaired—too carefully, indeed—from garret to cellar, furbished and decorated, repainted and polished outside and in. Of course it will not do to let houses go on forever wearing themselves out, and a decaying homestead has poetic charm only to passing travellers. Every-day life has its indispensabilities. But nobody cares that one’s house should be new any more than that one’s parents should be young. If they are young they are less entirely ours. They feel a right to an existence of their own, whereas later, our life is their life, and that is all that we ask of them, for we are not exacting.

Before the house was restored I was showing it to a lady, a lady from Paris like her of the lorgnette. It is probable, quite likely, certain, indeed, that I had previously sung its praises in no modest tones. My description doubtless lacked neither the farmer’s circumflex accents nor the lingering susurration of the Italian nurse. She may have expected to see another Versailles, or at the very least another Chantilly. So when, all alive with interest, duly instructed, and her anticipation keyed up to pitch, she was introduced to the incomparable edifice, she had the effrontery to exclaim in a tone of surprise, “Is this it?”

I felt her disappointment. With the utmost courtesy I escorted her to her carriage—even when boiling over with rage one is polite to a woman—but I have never seen her since that day: I should not be able to endure the sight of her. Perfect understanding with a stranger concerning the places and things of one’s childhood is simply impossible. It is a case of different dimensions. They are to be pitied, for their eyes are incapable of seeing. They do not see the house, they see only a house. How then are they to understand?

You come upon an iron gateway between two square granite columns;—the gate freshly painted and in three sections, those on either side bolted to the ground, permitting the use of only that in the centre. The three are opened only on grand occasions, for carriages and limousines. In old times they were opened for hay waggons. In old times, for that matter, you had only to push a little and you could go in by any gate you pleased, the bolts being out of commission. All sorts of unbidden folk used to come into the court, and to me their intrusions were highly disagreeable. Children are strongly conservative in their sense of proprietorship.

“What difference does it make?” grandfather would say.

Grandfather detested enclosures of any sort.

The stone columns used to be covered with moss, but now they are draped with climbing plants. The trees have been trimmed of the too-exuberant branches that used to seem to bend in blessing above the roof, or to tap upon the window panes. One never realises the vigour of a tree; grant it a few square yards and it soon overshadows them, and gradually draws nearer and nearer, like a friend who has the right of entrance. Now that our trees have been trimmed—for the time being—the sunlight caresses the walls of the old house, and this is better, in the matter of hygiene. Humidity is unwholesome, especially in autumn. But here is a puzzle; in my time, I mean in the time when I was young, there was a sun-dial carved in high relief upon the wall. Above it was a tarnished and half-effaced inscription, the secret of which I refused to penetrate: ME LUX, VOS UMBBA. Father had translated it for me and I made haste to forget it that I might still feel the thrill of the mysterious syllables. Above it was the iron finger whose slender shadow marked the hour all day long, and encircling it were the names of unknown cities, London, Boston, Pekin, and the rest, intended to show the differences in time the whole world round, as if the whole world were merely a dependance of the house, which dictated the laws of time to them all. But a linden tree, in an inadvertent moment, had rendered useless all this labour of light. The linden had indeed been pruned, but by an unlucky mischance, when the front of the house was restored the entire dial had been covered with a coat of whitewash. Oh, ill-starred restoration! But am not I responsible, for was it not I who ordered it? Grown people are capable of just such profanities. They do it without meaning any harm. No doubt I had said, carelessly, “That poor dial is of no use.” (The trees had not been trimmed then.) It is a mistake to let fall a thought; some one is sure to pick it up. A mason who had chanced to hear me actually thought to give me pleasure with his whitewash brush, and when I tried to restrain his zeal it was too late.

As a matter of fact, all these changes which I force myself to set down hardly affect me. Don’t think me stoical to that degree. I simply do not see the house as it is. It might be besmeared from cornice to foundation and I should not notice it. I always see it as it was in my time—the time, of course you understand, when I was little. I have it thus before my eyes for all the rest of my life.

The nice old cracks that used to look, not like wrinkles but like smiles, have all been closed up. A wing has been added for the convenience of the domestic economy; and as the tiles were falling off the roof they have been replaced by slates. I have no quarrel with slates. There are some of an almost lilac grey, like the throat of a turtle-dove, that are very prisms for reflecting the light. But slate roofs are flat and monotonous, uniform and without character, while tiles, rounded, irregular, humped, seem actually to stir, to move, to stretch themselves like the good old turtles in the garden, that sigh for fair weather, and hump their backs in protest against wind and rain. The colour of tiles shades from red to black, passing gradually or abruptly through all the diminishing tones between. And those who have eyes to see can guess at the age of the house entirely from the degree of their incrustation.

However, its age is accurately set down on the blackened tablet in the great chimney which is the glory of the kitchen. As soon as I rightly knew my letters and figures, father had set me to read the date, and I quite understood that he took pride in it, whereas grandfather sneered at the little ceremony, murmuring in the background, below his voice by way of not attracting too much attention, but quite distinctly enough for me to hear, “Do leave the child in peace!”

Was it 1610 or 1670? No one could be quite certain, short of calling together all our local academies. The stroke at the left of the upright was too horizontal for a 1 and not sufficiently so for a 7.

“It’s not of the slightest importance,” said grandfather, to whom I referred the matter.

However, I no longer doubted that it was 1610, when my history book informed me that this was the year of the assassination of Henry IV. My imagination demanded the association of a historic event with the building of our house. “The King left the Louvre in a coach. He occupied the back seat, the panels of which were open. The stopping of two carts at the entrance of the rue de la Ferronnerie, which was extremely narrow, forced the royal equipage to halt. At that very moment a man of thirty-two, of a sinister countenance, tall and very corpulent, red bearded and black haired, François Ravaillac, stepped with one foot upon the curb, the other upon the spoke of the wheel, and stabbed the King with two blows of a dagger, the second of which severed the pulmonary vein. Henri cried, ‘I am wounded,’ and almost instantly expired.” I can recall word for word the account in the history-book which I have not been able to find. No doubt the terrible picture of the murder which it gave aids my memory. And I was able to appreciate the importance of the dates by the significant detail that the rascal’s face infallibly proved that he was thirty-two years old—thirty-two, and not thirty-one or thirty-three. The rapidity of the drama in no wise prevented the accurate recognition of this detail. And when the historian added that the King was hastily carried back to the Louvre, bleeding from Ravaillac’s poniard, I pictured to myself the procession as at the door of the house. The house was our Louvre.

The kitchen was probably, was surely, the finest, largest, most comfortable, most honourable room in the house; banquets and balls might have been given in it. Such had been the custom in old times, and I should be the last to find fault with it. Though I have since dared to transform that kitchen into a hall paved with black and white marble, the walls handsomely done in panels of hard wood, and well lighted by a glass bay which occupies the entire side toward the sunset, I still find myself looking about me for stew-pans and frying-pans, and above all for the spit that used to turn there. I still smell the odours of ragouts and roasts, and whenever I see my guests entering the room I have an impulse to cry out upon the stupidity of the servants, exclaiming, “What possesses you to bring them in here!”

Here Mariette the cook held sway. Her power was absolute. Before her despotism people and furniture alike trembled. Happily, the wide spaces afforded room to escape her vigilant eye. There were shadowed corners where one could manage to keep out of sight, especially under the vast chimney mantel. The chimney had been put upon the retired list like an aged servant. I used not to know why; but I divine that it was from reasons of economy, for it was capable of consuming whole forests. Under its shelter one could make oneself quite comfortable on the old stone fire-dogs, that were cemented into their place. Bending back the head, one could see daylight at the top. In autumn, when night comes early, I used to look up to watch for a star. One night even, reluctantly crossing the kitchen, then dark and deserted, I was terrified by a square of light lying white upon the hearth-stone like an unfolded sheet. Was it the cast-off garment of a ghost? Perhaps they throw them off that way, at the moment of vanishing, leaving them as an incontrovertible witness to their visit. The moon was playing upon the roof.

The more coming and going there was, the better Mariette was pleased. Her tongue itched in solitude. As a general thing the postman, the farmer, the men who worked in the garden made their appearance there at regular intervals. Each and all were served with a glass of red wine, which they drank with unfailing observance of the rites. They lifted the elbow and said, “To your health,” after which it was permitted to drain the glass; and if a second were desired, even without the slightest interval, the same formula must be observed. Never a one of them balked at its repetition. I have sometimes drunk in their company, no doubt from the same glass.

Folk would come also from the mountain villages to get father when a case was serious. Father, who was a doctor, never demurred at going with them. I can still hear his words of greeting, at once compassionate and resolute, when he crossed Mariette’s empire and found it occupied.

“What is wrong now, friend?”

Mariette would scan all new-comers with a wary yet perspicacious eye, which unmasked frauds and congealed the blood in the veins of those unlucky wights whose arrival coincided with the sacred hour of a meal. I have been present at many an outpouring of peasant woes. They came out little by little, with a certain reticence of grief, as if illness were a disgraceful thing. I did not understand this reserve; indeed, it seemed to me simply slowness of speech.

The high-tide of the year, to the cook, was October, the vintage season. What comings and goings through the kitchen of vintagers at work in the wine-press! How important that their strength should be kept up by large reinforcements of boiled beef and potatoes, and how warm and savoury the steam that filled the kitchen from the great kettles! We children used to make the most of the confusion to settle ourselves upon the fire-dogs, our pockets full of nuts which the wind had scattered over the farm lane, or which we had ourselves surreptitiously knocked off with switches. A bit of flint served to crack them upon the hearth-stone. If they were still in their green husk a juice would squirt out, staining our hands and clothes with a pigment of which not the best soap could obliterate the tell-tale tokens. But the kernels, white as a fowl well dressed for a doll’s dinner, would crunch most deliciously between our teeth. Or we would stealthily pop our chestnuts on a corner of the stove, revelling in the warmth after coming in, chilled through, from kicking dead leaves before us in the face of the autumn winds; for in my country the winds are harsh and rude.

Many a time, too, have I curiously watched Mariette’s movements as she killed a fowl. Her dexterity and her indifference were alike extreme. Like the most experienced headsman she would decapitate ducks that continued to run around, headless, to my great admiration. One day she asked me to hold a reluctant victim during the operation. I indignantly refused my co-operation, whereupon she exclaimed, with the contempt which she often affected:

“Ho! how squeamish we are! You are ready enough to eat them!”

I am not going to conduct you through the whole house. It would take too long, for there are two stories above the ground floor, the second being much less ancient than the first, and above that a garret and the tower. The tower, which you reach by a winding stair, has four windows commanding the four quarters of the horizon. This diversified view, too extensive for my taste, never interested me much. I suppose that children care little for things that extend indefinitely, things that do nothing, clouds, vague landscapes. On stormy days the wind made an infernal hubbub around the tower; one might have fancied it a living creature, ill-mannered and strong, heaping insults upon the walls before throwing them down. The staircase was none too light; at nightfall it was easy to get frightened there, and as the steps were very narrow on the side of the supporting pillar, you were likely to get a fine carabosse if you hurried. Carabosse was a word which Aunt Deen had invented for severe falls occasioned by hurrying; falls from which one picked oneself up lame, bruised and swollen; the word no doubt came from the wicked fairy Carabosse.

As for the garret, not one of us would have gone there without company. A single dormer window grudgingly admitted an insufficient light, just enough to give to the heaps of wood, faggots and cast-off things of all sorts that gradually accumulated there to wear out a useless existence, the appearance of instruments of torture or fearsome personages. Moreover, it was the battle ground of hosts of rats. From the rooms below one might have supposed they were amusing themselves with regularly organised obstacle races. Once in a while the cat was carried up there—a superb, lazy Angora, fond of good eating and little disposed to warfare. He was no doubt afraid of spoiling his fine coat, and would meow in terror until Aunt Deen, whose special care he was, released him from military duty, at no long delay.

The drawing room, the shades of which were generally drawn and which was only opened on ceremonial occasions or on reception days, was forbidden ground to us; and likewise my father’s study, crowded with books, apparatus and vials. We ventured into it only for hasty explorations, but I used to see all sorts of forlorn creatures going in there, who usually came out looking much happier. By way of compensation, the dining room was given over to us. It was the scene of many a tumult, and the chairs had more than once to be re-seated and their backs strengthened. Into mother’s room, which was very large, we used to rush at all times. It was so centrally situated that every sound in the house reached it, and from it our mother quietly, and without attracting attention, watched over her whole domain; nothing went on in it that she did not know at once. In our eagerness for conquest we even took possession of the music room, a small octagon parlour, of marvellous acoustic properties, which opened upon a balcony looking southward. The family usually spent the summer evenings in this room, on account of the balcony.

I have still to tell of the garden. But if I describe it as it seems to me, you will think, like the lady from Paris, that it is one of those vast domains that surround historic châteaux. I have never yet been able to understand, as I walk in it now, how it could once have seemed so large to me; but as soon as I am no longer there it regains its true importance in my memory. Perhaps it is because in those days it was so ill kept that one easily gained the impression of being lost in it. With the exception of the kitchen-garden, the beds of which were straight and orderly, every part of it was at haphazard. In the orchard, where pears and peaches that our insinuating fingers were forever testing never succeeded in ripening before they were picked, the grass grew thick and tall, as tall as me, upon my word! Always, in the orchard, I used to think of the virgin forests that the Children of Captain Grant travelled through. A rose garden, the chef d’œuvre of a flower-loving ancestor, bloomed in a corner whenever it felt so disposed, and with no aid either from pruning shears or watering pot. Mother used to work in it in her moments of rare leisure, but it really needed an expert in the art. The alleys were overgrown with weeds—one had to search to find a path. On the other hand, other walks that had never been laid out appeared in the very midst of the grass plots. And just under mother’s windows there was a fountain; you didn’t hear it in the daytime, you were so used to it, but in the night, when all was still, its monotonous wail filled all the silence and made me sad, I did not know why.

I have forgotten to mention the vines that were trained against the farm buildings, and which interested us only when we could relieve them of their grapes. And now at last I come to the loveliest tangle imaginable of bushes, brambles, nettles, and all sorts of wild plants, that was our own special domain. There we were masters and sovereign lords. There was nothing more before you reached the surrounding wall except a chestnut grove, which was simply an extension of our own empire. When I say chestnut grove, I mean four or five chestnut trees. But one alone could cast a wide shade. There was one whose roots had overthrown a section of the wall. By this open breach, which I never approached without a sense of discomfort, I used to imagine that robbers might come in.

To be sure, I was armed. Father had told us the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the story of Roland and various other tales of adventure, from the hearing of which I would sally forth all on fire, impetuous and heroic. By turns I would be the furious Roland or the magnanimous Hector. With my wooden sword I would give mortal combat to Greeks or Saracens, impersonated by certain shrubs, but of which the peaceable cabbages and unoffending beets sometimes bore the brunt as I cut right and left among them.

My arms were provided by one of the queer labourers we used to employ in the garden or about the vines. There were three of them, each working by himself in his corner, each with his special qualifications but with undefined duties, though care was taken to keep them apart. They detested one another. Where had they been picked up? Their selection was no doubt due to grandfather’s inveterate indifference, for he let every one, including the property, go his own way. Or perhaps it was due to mother’s tender heart, for she was easily capable of having fished up such pitiful wrecks of humanity as these.

The first and earliest in my memory, the one who was my armourer into the bargain, went by the name of Tem Bossette. Both appellations were nicknames, I suppose, and their origin is not hard to discover. Tem must have been derived from Anthelmus, who is a saint venerated in our province. As for the nickname Bossette, I long supposed it to be an indelicate allusion to the curve of his back, due to long leaning over the spade. But I have found an etymology that better suits his character, especially his laziness, and I humbly submit it to messieurs the philologers, who will be able, according to their custom, to consecrate to it several folio volumes. In our country the word bosse has more than one meaning; it especially designates the cask in which the vintage is deposited for convenient removal from the vineyard, and I can still see the bewilderment stamped upon the countenance of a friend to whom I was doing the honours of my native town, on reading a poster, a simple little poster, containing the words For sale, an oval bosse. “Happy region,” he commented, “where hunchbacks can carry their gibbosities to market.” He thought himself very clever when he added, “But do they find purchasers?” I explained to him his mistake. Now Tem was a notable drunkard. Our cellar knew that better than any one. Bossette, little wine cask; he also could contain a grape harvest; and even, toward the close of his life, the diminutive might have been suppressed.

He used to make swords for me out of the stakes on which the vines were tied. In recompense I used to bring him extra bottles of wine, which I procured from Aunt Deen, who had special charge of the cellar, urging upon her the splendour of my armament. From time to time there arose a complaint that the vine trellises were defective and the untrained branches trailing on the ground, absorbing dampness. But grandfather, good naturedly indifferent, never blamed any one, and please reckon up how many stakes were necessary to my complete equipment. I needed them for my panoplies, I needed them for my stables. The number of my horses bore witness to my magnificence. With a stick between my legs I acquired an astonishing velocity, and for each battle I must needs change horses.

Tem Bossette would have been tall if he had stood up straight, but as to his stoutness there was no question, and his round head greatly resembled a pumpkin. “Big head, little wit,” Mimi Pachoux used to say of him, pursing up his lips. Mimi Pachoux was gardener, orchard man, lamp man, smoke doctor, locksmith, cabinet maker, mender of clocks and china, floor-waxer, wood-sawyer, errand man and I know not what more. Oh, yes, in the winter he used to be bearer of the dead. Did any difficulty arise, was any help needed? “Call Mimi!” grandfather would say. And they would call Mimi—a matter of several hours, for no one ever knew where he was, so that when he at last arrived the work would be done; but every one gave him the credit of it.

“That Mimi, he no sooner comes than everything goes well!”

Picture to yourself a little scrap of a man, thin, clean, prompt, lively and invisible into the bargain. Invisible, that is what I mean, unless you would prefer to grant him the gift of ubiquity. Every morning he would begin a half dozen days’ works; here at six o’clock, and perhaps earlier—oh, that Mimi! What zeal!—At five past six at another job, and before the quarter hour at a third, loudly announcing himself at the first, running to the second, flying to the third, slipping in here, stealing out secretly, running back furtively, replying here, explaining there, protesting elsewhere, appearing, disappearing, reappearing, beginning in haste, going on in a hurry, finishing nothing, and at evening getting paid in three places at once. Grandfather used to say that several persons among his acquaintance could see their double. Father would observe that it was a well known malady, requiring nothing but drink for its production. I tried it once, but I saw everything shifting about. It was Tem Bossette who used to drink, but our Mimi Pachoux could see his triple.

As to the third member of our force, it was essential never to lose sight of him for a minute, because of his fixed determination to hang himself. He had made several attempts that had ended in failure. We used to watch him in relays. Mariette would refuse him the slightest bit of cord, however pressing his need of it, and he was carefully assigned to work where the uncovered spaces were largest. In early days he used to be called Dante, but his name was really Beatrix. His nickname was given him by the keeper of our departmental archives, a man of wit. His face was long and woe-begone, and he was so possessed with the desire to hie him to the lower regions that it was continually necessary to cut his rope. By degrees he came to be called Le Pendu, or the Hanged, and was known by no other name. Very few were willing to employ him because of the police force requisite to ward off his catastrophes. Mother was his providence. The heavy jobs were intrusted to him, but he generally gave them over to Aunt Deen, who was strong, active, and capable of moving even the heavy casks, while he looked on with admiration, open-mouthed and with swinging arms. His mouth contained only two teeth, which by marvellous good luck were precisely one above the other, so that when one met the other you might suppose that it was one tooth uniting the two jaws.

You can understand to what a degree our garden was neglected. Should I have loved it more, blooming with flowers and fruits, than in this lamentable condition, in which it seemed to me immense and measureless and mysterious?

Dear old garden, with your crazy weeds, always a little too damp and much too shady because of branches left to their own will, where I have played so much and invented so many games, where I have known the glory of combat, the wonders of exploration, the pride of conquest, the intoxication of freedom; not to mention the friendship of trees and the pleasantness of fruit gathered in secret! Who would recognise you to-day? Raked, reduced to order, pruned, watered, your alleys sanded, your turf cut close around the flower urns, never flatter yourself that you can dazzle me with your beauty!

When I walk in my garden I still go as I please, trampling down the borders, treading underfoot the grass plots, endangering the flowers, until the new gardener—who by himself alone only too ably replaces Tem Bossette, Mimi Pachoux, and the Hanged—cries out in a voice of consternation:

“Do take care, sir!”

I must excuse him. He does not know that I am walking in my garden of long ago.

To complete this portrait of the house, there still is lacking—oh, almost nothing! Almost nothing yet almost everything, two things indeed, a shadow and a footstep.

The footstep was my father’s; no one ever mistook it. Rapid, regular, resonant, it was his and no other’s. Once it was heard on the threshold a magic change passed over everything. Tem Bossette plied his spade with unsuspected vigour, Mimi Pachoux, till then invisible, popped up like an imp out of a bottle. The Hanged tackled the heaviest casks, Mariette stirred her fire, all of us children came to order, and grandfather—I don’t know why—went out. Was there a difficulty to solve, a trouble to bear, a danger to fear? Let some one say, “Here he is,” and it was all over, every anxiety dissipated, every one taking a long breath as after a victory. Aunt Deen especially had a way of saying, “Here he is,” which would have put to flight the most daring aggressor. It was as much as to say, “Just wait! You will see what will happen. It won’t take long: Another minute and justice will be done!” Once aware of his presence, we felt in ourselves an invincible strength, a sense of security, of protection, of an armed peace, and also a sense of being under command. Each had his own part. But grandfather loved neither to command nor to be commanded.

And the shadow—it was my mother’s, there behind the half closed window blind, whenever all the family was not gathered around her. She is waiting for father, or for our return from school. Some one is absent, and she is anxious. Or the weather is threatening—she is looking at the sky? wondering whether to light the blessed candle.

A different sort of peace emanates from her, a peace—how shall I describe it?—that reaches beyond the things of life, that enters into one and calms the nerves and heart, the peace of love and prayer. That shadow, which I used to look for every time I came in, that I look for now, though well enough I know that it is not there, that it is elsewhere—that shadow was the soul of the house, showing through it as thought shows in a face.

Thus were we guarded.

Beyond the house was the town, on a lower level, as was fitting, and still beyond a great lake and the mountains, and more distant still, the rest of the world. But all these were simply dependencies of The House.

II
THE DYNASTY

THOSE days were in the reign of my grandfather.

A long line of ancestors must have reigned before him, to judge by the portraits in the drawing room. Most of these portraits were now much blackened, so that unless there was a flood of light it was pretty difficult to guess what the frames held. One of the most defaced of them was the one that most commanded my admiration. Only the face and one hand were visible—they might have been a woman’s face and hand; but I had been told of the important part their owner had borne in the wars, and I wondered how so young and handsome a man could have fought so much. The lady with the rose attracted me, too. No matter on what side of her I stood, from every side she smiled upon me and showed me her flower. I pass over certain stem faces trussed up in high collars, swathed in huge neckcloths, as if afflicted with colds, and come to two portraits which occupied the place of honour on the right and left of the chimney. One wore a blue coat laced with silver, a scarlet waistcoat, white knee breeches and the three-cornered hat of the French Guard. The other wore the bear-skin cap and the blue great coat with gilt buttons and red braid on sleeves and collar of a grenadier of the Old Guard. The soldier of the King and the soldier of the Emperor were companion pictures. To judge by their decorations, both had well served France. Father had proudly told me of their exploits, and explained their grade. I could not look at them without a sort of reverential fear. They were not handsome, having more bone than flesh, and features all out of drawing, but I should not have dared to call them ugly. Their eyes, severely fixed upon me, troubled me. They reproached me for not having achieved wonderful victories like that of the grenadier at Moscow, or for at least not having undergone heroic defeat like the French Guard at Malplaquet. For a long time these two were the only names of battles that I knew. And I used to blush for Tem Bossette’s wooden sabres and the laths that I bestrode. I understood that my feats of horsemanship in the garden were not serious, were not real. Those two redoubtable portraits sometimes puffed me up with pride and again overwhelmed me with their importance. One day when I was gazing upon them with some uneasiness grandfather came by, and with his little dry smile and his most impertinent pursing of the lips, let fall the words,

“Pooh! They are only bad paintings.”

It is dangerous to teach too much esthetics to a child. I was glad that they were bad paintings. In a moment the soldier of the King with his three-cornered hat and the soldier of the Emperor with his bear-skin cap lost all their fascination. Thenceforth their story was nothing to me. I was set free from the servitude of a compelled admiration. I at once felt my superiority over a badly painted past, and could judge the gallery of ancestors with insolence.

One day the subject of exiling them to the garret was agitated. Grandfather desired to replace them with engravings.

“They are of the eighteenth century,” he observed, by way of settling the question, making the statement simply and courteously, as the most natural thing in the world. But Aunt Deen exclaimed indignantly and father exerted that calm authority that broke down all resistance. Grandfather did not insist; he never insisted. But I understood him, since they were bad paintings.

Grandfather’s government was negligent and fitful. As well say he had no government. When I read in my history book, or in that of my elder brothers, the chapter consecrated to the sluggard kings I immediately thought of grandfather. He made no point at all of his prerogatives. And yet his name was Augustus. I knew it, because great-aunt Bernardine, she whom we called Aunt Deen, and who was his sister, called him Augustus, though as seldom as possible, for his name irritated him.

“Yes,” he said one day, “they named me Augustus—why the mischief I don’t know. That’s another trick that ancestors have. They fasten a ridiculous label upon you for all your days.”

Though of medium height, grandfather gave the impression of being tall, because of his fine head, which he was not in the least proud of and carried with indifference. His well-cut nose was slightly aquiline. His white hair, which he would never have had cut but for Aunt Deen’s abrupt interventions, curled a little, and he was continually thrusting his fingers through his long beard,—which waved like that of the Emperor Charlemagne in the pictures,—lest some grains of tobacco should be caught in it, for he smoked and took snuff. On a nearer view the impression as of a prophet which he first gave gradually faded away and vanished. He looked down too often, or lifted upon you vague eyes that refused to see you. You felt that you did not exist, so far as he was concerned, and nothing is more irritating than that. He cared for nothing and for no one. His clothes hung upon his body by the grace of God and Aunt Deen. He never knew whether they were well or ill fitting, and as to changing them he would gladly have worn them till they left him first. The more worn they were the more was he at ease in them. I fancy that he had never known the use of suspenders, and cravats seemed to him a wretched concession to fashion. He detested whatever restricted his movements and would have been content to wear all day long the green dressing gown and the black velvet Greek cap in which he felt at ease, and which he did sometimes wear to the midday breakfast. When my brothers and I saw him appear in this accoutrement we would be bursting with laughter which a glance from our father forced us to smother; but the same glance seemed to include a reproof of the famous dressing gown.

It was with great difficulty that grandfather could be induced to be regular at meals.

“Oh,” he would say good-naturedly, “one eats when he is hungry. Rules for meal times are absurd.”

“Still,” father would urge, evidently not pleased, but endeavouring to speak gently—yet even in our father’s gentleness we felt an impression of authority—“still there must be order in a household.”

“Order, order, oho!”

You should have heard his “ohos!” uttered softly, warily, in a sort of aside, yet striking at all established order, and accompanied by a little dry laugh. That little laugh at once placed grandfather above his interlocutors. Nothing have I ever met in all the forms of human expression more disquieting, more mocking, more ironical, than that little laugh. It at once gave you the idea that you were a beast. It produced upon me the effect of the sharp clip of the shears when the rose bushes are pruned; ric, rac, the flowers fall; ric, rac, there are none left. By his little laugh, involuntarily, no doubt, grandfather offered an insult to all the world.

His presiding at table was honorary and not effective. Not only did he not direct the conversation, he followed it but fitfully, when it interested him. For that matter, he assumed no responsibility about anything. When he walked in the garden, visited the vines, Tem, Mimi and The Hanged utterly failed to extract from him any directions. He would simply make a vague gesture which signified “Let me alone.” The trio did not make a point of receiving instructions, for his silence suited them, but matters went none the better in consequence.

Besides his laugh, he had another claim to superiority, his violin. Was he not in the drawing room among the portraits, young and curly-haired, with a guitar in his hands?

“Never in my life have I twanged that odious instrument,” he one day protested. “But a wandering Italian felt impelled to make a daub of me.”

“You were so beautiful,” asserted Aunt Deen. “The artist was all enthusiasm over you.”

“Oh, the artist!”

He would spend long hours in his room playing his instrument, but he devoted still more time to examining it lovingly, handling it, tightening or loosening the strings, touching the bow with resin, as mowers in the fields so often spend more time whetting their scythes than in mowing, indefinitely making music upon them with a stone.

When grandfather played he turned every one out of his room. He played for himself alone, and in general the same airs, for I often listened at the door; and in after years I used to recognise passages that he played from the Freischütz and Euryanthe, the Magic Flute and the Marriage of Figaro. Mozart’s pure rhythms were to me like that joy in breathing that one takes in childhood without noticing it, as limpid water takes on the contours of a vase; but Weber gave me a vague desire for things which I could not describe. I seemed to be in the heart of a forest, with paths stretching away interminably into the lost distances.

The pieces that he played were not all of equal merit, though I could not know that. Everything is good to a child in the springtime of sentiment. To this day I can not hear the overture to Poet and Peasant without emotion. One evening at Lucerne, by the lake side, the most ordinary of orchestras in the most ordinary of hotels began that overture. Around me men in dinner jackets and ladies in evening gowns went on chatting and laughing as if they heard nothing, as if they were deaf, yet I felt utterly alone, my heart melting and I thought I should weep. The orchestra was not playing for the public, it was playing for me alone, no longer the mediocre art of the Austrian composer, but the memory of my entrance as a child into the mysterious realm of sound and dreams, in the forest whose paths stretch away into the infinite.

At the same period the singing of one of my school comrades quite overcame me. It was at a first communion service. I had not yet been admitted to the Holy Table and was at leisure to listen. He sang that melody of Gounod, Heaven Has Visited the Earth, and quite truly heaven was visiting me, taking me by storm, carrying me away. My whole enraptured being made a part of that song. The voice rose high, higher, it seemed that it must break, that it was not strong enough to bear up those mighty notes that filled all the chapel. It seemed like those tall fountains, so slender that the wind carries them away, so that they never fall to earth. That voice was indeed broken as the boy became a youth; death carried away my comrade in his sixteenth year.

Then there was a music box that father had brought me from Milan whither he had been summoned for a consultation. When the screw was turned it gave forth soft, thin, somewhat quavering notes, and a little dancer would pirouette upon the cover. Gravely and in cadence with the music she would point her toes and take her position as if she were accomplishing a sacred rite, a sweet yet sad little spectacle. How many times have I been disenchanted in later years when I discovered that my partners in the ball were frivolous, when I had expected to find in them tender sweetness, that sacred sadness of the little dancer of my music box.

The sluggard kings in my history book were accompanied by mayors of the palace, who, at first mere officers charged with the interior government, became prime ministers and even masters of their masters. In school we heard eulogiums upon Pepin d’Heristal and Pepin the Short, who became the father of Charlemagne. Grandfather was not a very serious king and I quite expected father to take over the power. But why did he treat grandfather with so much respect, instead of dispossessing him? History had taught me to expect a different attitude. To the farmers, labourers and servant folk grandfather was just Monsieur, or Monsieur Rambert, and father was Monsieur Michel. It would never have entered any one’s head to call upon monsieur, to consult monsieur, to ask monsieur for an order. Monsieur would have been the first to protest. “What do you want of me? Leave me in peace. I have no time (I could never understand why he had no time). Go to Monsieur Michel.” Thus he himself set the example. I had concluded like every one else that he was good for nothing. Yet once in a while, no one knew why, he would protest against being left out in matters of the palace—I mean to say, of the house. But whenever a serious matter was in question, an important order to be given, one would hear on all sides the cry, “Where is Monsieur Michel? Call Monsieur Michel!”

I have spoken of my father’s step. There was also his voice, sonorous, thrilling, cheery. He never raised it, he knew that there was no need. It opened doors, penetrated to the most distant rooms, and at the same time poured into the heart new strength, like a good glass of red wine—as folk declare who understand such things. When he came late to dinner because of the crowd of patients who hung upon him, there was no need to ring the bell,—from his ante-room he would proclaim, as it were an edict, “Dinner!”

And the dispersed family would make haste to assemble.

“What a voice!” grandfather would protest, starting as if in amazement.

I can never read expressions like the following, which occur more or less in all manuals of history, save in those of the present day in which battles are juggled with as if they gained themselves—At the voice of their chief the soldiers rushed to the assault.—At the voice of their general the troops rallied—without hearing my father’s voice echoing through all the house. Tem Bossette, who was fearfully afraid of it, would hear it from the uttermost vines. The step announced a presence, but the voice gave orders. And yet the labourers were not under my father; all the same every one of them felt that he was the head. Everything about him conspired to give this impression; his height, his clear cut features, crossed by a short stiff moustache, his piercing eyes, the gaze of which one did not like to encounter. A sort of fascination emanated from his person. Aunt Deen, who shared the general sentiment, would say my nephew, as if bursting with pride. The grenadier in the drawing-room could not have pursed up his lips otherwise to speak of the Emperor. I had not escaped this fascination, and even in my days of revolt I never ceased to pay him secret worship. But the spirit of liberty impels us to act contrary to our surest instincts, under pretext of asserting our liberty.

Do not think he was severe with us. He became terrible only when we were taking the wrong direction. Only, I have never known in any one else such an aptitude for command. In spite of his absorbing profession he found time to look after our studies and plays, and even to add to both by the epic stories which with consummate art he used to tell us. My memory retains them to this day, and will retain them always. It was easy to see that he honoured the family portraits. He made the past of our ancestors live again for us, but I could never forget that they were bad paintings.

When we felt ourselves observed by father we understood that in his glance, which encompassed our weakness with his strength, there was something besides tenderness and perhaps pride, but what was it? I know now that he was seeking in each one of us forecasts of our future. The antiquity of our race was not enough to satisfy his love of permanence; he would fain follow it into the obscure travail of the future and consolidate its unity. Even our happiness was less dear to him than the obedience of our will to the common task. The father’s glance enfolds within it the child’s image; the child knows that well, and it is all he needs to know.

While we were very little he taught us reverence for what he called our vocation. From our earliest years we felt its importance. My sister Mélanie, who was oldest of all, my brothers Bernard and Stephen had early decided upon theirs—for Bernard the army, for the other two the mission field. Father never thought of opposing them, although perhaps these choices forced him to resign hopes that he had cherished. The laughing Louise would marry, there was no hurry about that. As for Nicola and James, they were still too little for much thought about their future.

“And you?” my father had asked me.

As I had no answer ready, he gave utterance to his desire.

“You will remain with us.”

Thus it was agreed that I was to remain, to take charge of the household. The part assigned to me hardly allured me; it seemed tame and commonplace, whereas the destinies of the others were adorned with all the glamour of leaving home. I neither confirmed nor opposed the plan proposed for my future, but within myself I felt a wild desire to be set free from these arrangements, from this power that dominated me. Secret longings to rebel even against those I loved began to germinate within me. Later they were destined to grow, under an influence at that time unforeseen.

I ought now to tell about The Queen. Is it not her turn? Yet in truth I can not do it and you must not ask me to. That shadow which I always seek as I return to the house, and which our absence was always enough to disquiet—I can only invoke her presence there. It is indeed she, but remote and hidden. When I try to draw near her I can find no words.

Have you observed, on fine summer days, the blue haze that floats over the hillsides and helps to bring out the delicate contours of the earth? If I could throw a transparent veil like that over my mother’s face, it seems to me that I should have more courage to tell of her sweetness, to describe the pureness of those eyes which could not believe in evil. What unknown strength was concealed beneath that sweetness? Grandfather, who could ward off any influence merely by his irritating little laugh, and who never laid aside this weapon of defence even with his son, invariably abandoned it before my mother. And my father, whose authority seemed to be absolute and infallible, would turn to her as if he recognised in her some mysterious power.

I know now what that power was: it was God dwelling in her, whether she had been to meet him at early mass, before any one else was up and stirring, or whether she had offered to him her daily labours in the house....

My brothers and sisters and I were the people. In every kingdom there must be a people. It is true that in most houses now-a-days one wonders what has become of the people. The king and queen, dejected as two weeping willows, are wearily watching one another grow old. They have no one to govern and they will not lay aside their crown. At our house the people were numerous and noisy. If you can count, you already know that there were seven of us, from Mélanie who was seven years older than I, to James, who was six years younger.

Before being led into action, the whole battalion used to undergo a preliminary inspection from Aunt Deen, who was in charge of the review of details.

Aunt Deen was endowed with an activity which years could not abate, and of which all the servants except Mariette shamelessly took advantage. Always coming and going, from cellar to garret, always on the stairs—for she invariably forgot half the things she intended to do, or suddenly interrupted whatever she might be doing—beginning to sweep, leaving off to hunt dust under a piece of furniture, warring against spider’s webs with a wolf’s head—a sort of brush fastened to the end of a long pole,—or rushing to the aid of one of us who had cried out, she had rocked, washed, dressed, cuddled, watched over, amused, kept busy, cared for and caressed all seven of us, and even an eighth, who had died before I could remember.

To this imposing number must also be added grandfather, whom she shielded from all care. He was not exacting. Provided he could have at hand whatever he might desire he asked no favours of any one. To be sure, the disorder of his room must always be respected; he watched over it jealously, insisting that no one could ever find things that had been put away. He took the indulgence of his whims as a matter of course, paying no attention except when he was irritated by an exaggerated degree of consideration.

As for our education and training, our moral guidance, Aunt Deen, notwithstanding her advantage in the matter of age, placed herself at the service of our mother, for whom she entertained unlimited admiration and affection. Even in old age she would accept the functions of a subaltern only. When she had said “Valentine wishes this; Valentine says that” (Valentine was our mother), there was no room for discussion. She herself obeyed to the very letter, without even seeking to enter into the spirit. Not one of her thoughts was for herself; she distributed them all, without exception, among the others. She could see no good in scolding, and hung her head when any of us was reprimanded, as if in protest against the harshness of authority. She not only never carried tales about us, she found unimagined excuses for our worst faults, such wonderful excuses as sometimes to ward off punishment merely by the surprise which they awakened.

“That child has taken some pears.”

“The tree needed relief, it was too heavily loaded.”

“That child’s table manners aren’t nice. Did you see him put his hands into his saucer of spinach?”

“He does so delight in green things!”

In our studies she took no interest. But she had that soul-culture which bestows its delicate flower upon the mind. One knew quite enough if one was well behaved and a good Catholic. Indeed it was her opinion that our brains were too early crowded with a lot of useless knowledge. She could find no manner of use for the history of pagans, and as for arithmetic, she had never known how to add. But on the other hand our health, our cleanliness, our happiness, were entirely her affair. She sang to put us to sleep, she sang to amuse us, she sang to encourage us to take our first steps. All my memories reverberate with the tintinnabulation of her songs. There was one cradle song in which we became by turns general, cardinal and emperor, and the refrain of which was designed to encourage us to wait with patience for the brilliant future.

“Meanwhile wait, and on my lap.

Lovely cherub, take your nap.”

The lovely cherubim, however, were seldom in haste to take their naps.

There was also the “Charming Nest” which “naughty little sharp-eyed imps” tried to destroy, though it ought to be respected, for

“It was the hope of Spring time

And all a mother’s love.”

Sometimes it would be the prisoner Silvio Pellico who in heart-rending strains longed for his Italian breezes. One of my earliest plays was the escape of Silvio Pellico, though I had no idea who he was. My favourite songs were perhaps “The Pool” and “Venice.” I call them thus because I knew no other titles for them. “The Pool” told of a fearful tragedy from drowning:

Little children, have a care

When you run across and follow.

There’s a deep pool hidden there

By the dark trees in the hollow.

Listen to what happened there,

When a child with golden hair,

Slipped away from his mamma-a-a.

The fair child was running after a dragon-fly, and “the maiden with golden wings” enticed him into the cold water. That would teach him not to steal away from the maternal arms! As for “Venice,” I remember likewise the first lines, with all their doggerel:

If God should favor-ize

My noble enterprise,

I’ll hie me to Ven-ize

And spend my days in joy.

Whether from the magic of the name of an unknown city, or the melancholy air of the ritornello, I could in those days imagine no more enchanting journey than to go to that Venice whose gondolas I had been shown in a stereoscope. In later years, dreading disappointment, I hesitated long before carrying out the plan born of that far-away music—the music that we still hear within ourselves long after childhood’s days are past. Can it be that this is one of the surest guardians of the home?—that a simple lullaby, sung to quiet us, is the first spark to kindle our imaginations? And when, long after, I at last saw the city of flowing streets and rosy palaces, I entered it with respect, recalling to mind that my visit represented a “noble enterprise”; as if all its wondrous charm had been enfolded in Aunt Deen’s cradle-song.

I imagine that some of her innumerable songs were of her own invention. Or at least, having forgotten their precise words, I suppose that she recomposed them after her own fashion. There was especially a certain “Father Gregory,” half recited, half sung, which is hardly likely to be found in any collection. A charming old lady to whom I repeated it one day assured me that Father Gregory was known also in Berry, in the neighbourhood of Châtre, under the name of Father Christopher. The song, a sort of rhythmical prose, was declaimed in a singsong, suddenly bursting into a tune in the final syllables. A whole little comedy of vanity is summed up in a few phrases. You may judge for yourself from the version of it that I tell from memory.

Father Gregory came out of his house this morning. Perfectly natural thus far; Father Gregory is going to take a walk, as is his right; but wait till you hear a detail that characterises this promenade: in his hat a fine bouquet of poppies. You must swell out your voice with the poppies. This field flower becomes a symbol of pomp and ostentation. Aha! Father Gregory is no longer a worthy fellow who goes out to inhale the breezes of the country-side; he is an old beau who puts on airs; he parades, he struts, he capers, he expects to be gazed at and admired. But you will be punished, Father Gregory; ill-luck awaits you!

On the way his dog began to fight with mine. This bit of news is simply announced. It seems at first to be of slight importance. A bad thing nevertheless,—a dog fight in a little town. What! you don’t know that? You have never lived in the country? A dog fight is a matter of special gravity. The masters intervene, they take sides, and the defeated one swears that the matter shall not end here. Whole families have been embroiled through a dog fight. What was the origin of the enmity between the Montagus and the Capulets? Perhaps a dog fight. And just this way our Father Gregory undertakes to interfere; his dog is getting the worst of it, rolled in the dust as a dumpling in flour. Father Gregory, trying to part them, tumbles, nose first, in the filth. He rushes to the rescue with uplifted cane, his foot slips, and behold him on the ground in a lamentable posture, especially his nose, having made a most unlucky choice of a spot upon which to fall. At this point it is proper to assume a melancholy tone, the apostrophe which follows reaching a note of heart-rending grief. Poor Father Gregory! A pause. He is to be pitied, for his misfortune is great. But suddenly, pity becomes sarcasm, pointing to his pride. See his bunch of poppies, far from his hat! The emblems of his vanity are soiled. He himself may go home, and wash and brush himself, but he can never use the poppies again, and but for them nothing would have happened to him.

I attribute Father Gregory to Aunt Deen because of the fertility of her imagination, which daily provided her with new stories for our delectation. Grown persons are not often on a level with children: they take too low a place. Aunt Deen had an instinct for what was suited to us. Her stories kept us breathless. When I try to rescue them from the past, for her credit, they fly before me, smiling. “No, no,” they say—for I get close to them, only between us is a great chasm, deep, though not wide, which is the common grave of all my vanished years—“what is the use? You can never do anything with us. See: we have taken the colour of that time: how are you to describe that?”

When grandfather came upon us sitting in a circle around our story-teller, he would shake his head disapprovingly.

“Fiddle-faddles”, he would murmur; “fiddle-faddles. One owes it to children to tell them the truth.”

We would ask Aunt Deen what fiddle-faddles were, and she would answer, by way of getting her revenge, “It’s what one does when one plays the violin.”

Between her songs and grandfather’s violin there was sometimes a deafening discord.

Aunt Deen possessed another marvellous faculty—that of inventing words. I have already told you of carabosser, but she invented them by the hundred, so well adapted to their purpose that we understood them at once. I can not transcribe them—they lose their value when written down. Indeed I don’t know how to spell them; spoken language is not the same as written language, and her picturesque words had all the savour and crispness of popular speech. Aunt Deen also used rare words—where she found them is a mystery for she seldom read—strange and sonorous words and phrases that seemed her special property, and which since then, to my surprise and amusement, I have discovered in the dictionary, where I should never have thought of looking for them. Thus, to call down my pride, she one day called me a hospodar, and another day, “the purveyor in chief of mustard to the Pope.” I did not know that the hospodars were the tyrants of Wallachia, and that to believe oneself purveyor of mustard to the Pope meant to have a high opinion of oneself. These strange titles with which she invested me used to make me think of some big man, all in red, issuing commands in a loud voice, and I did not enjoy being likened to him.

Dear great-aunt Deen, let me apostrophise you after the manner of poor Father Gregory! If my early childhood rings musically in my memory, as if it were mounted upon one of those mules all bedight with sleigh-bells, that can not move without giving forth a multitudinous jingle from far away as if to announce the approach of a great train, I owe it to your stories and your songs. As soon as thought summons it, and that is daily, here it comes, loudly ringing its joy-bells, because of which I shall never have reason to complain of fate. Before I see it, I hear it—that merry procession of memory; and when, at some turn of the road that leads from the past to the present, it suddenly comes upon me, it bears in its arms all the flowers of the springtide. You well deserve the bouquet of them that I pick for you, even a bouquet of poppies, as a guerdon for all the stories that you added to your care and prayers. For you were always praying audibly, on the stairs or in church or even under the banner of the wolf’s head itself. Silence was painful to you. That is why, dear Aunt Deen, I break it this evening and talk to you.

Aunt Deen kept strenuous watch outside of the house. To get inside you had, like the wolf in Hans Christian Andersen, to show a white paw like a sheep. She designated by the name of they the invisible foes that were supposed to be investing it. For a long time these mysterious they terrified us. We used to look around whenever she spoke of them. By dint of never meeting them we at last came to laugh at them, little thinking that this laugh disarmed us, and that thus disarmed we should surely meet them later in flesh and blood. Her loyalty was never caught napping. The moment the family was in question she would insist upon a meed of praise being at once awarded it, failing which she promptly assumed the defensive, ready for battle. A certain person who ventured to speak of it in colourless terms found himself scanned from head to foot, and to mask his sense of defeat took refuge in sarcasm:

“I forgot,” said he, “that your house was the Ark of the Covenant.”

“And yours Noah’s Ark,” she retorted with a tic for his tac, knowing that her interlocutor harboured all sorts of shady folk.

In those days the bread was made in the kitchen in a kneading trough nearly a hundred years old, before being carried for baking to the town oven. Aunt Deen, who loved all sorts of cookery, used to oversee the operation, and even at times take a hand in it herself. One day when I was looking on, at the moment when the servant was about to mingle the flour, water and leaven, my aunt suddenly gave her a vigorous shake.

“What are you thinking of, girl?”

“Mixing the bread, miss.”

“You are forgetting the sign of the cross.”

For in serious houses no one omitted the sign of the cross over white flour that was on the point of being made into bread. At table, before cutting the loaf, father never failed to trace upon it a cross, with two strokes of the knife. When it fell to grandfather to cut the bread I was quick to notice that he did nothing of the kind.

That was one of my first surprises. From my earliest days I understood the importance of differences of opinion in matters religious.

Grandfather played his violin whenever he pleased. But he did not like to be disturbed. We learned this by experience. My sister Mélanie and my brother Stephen, who had retained from their first communion an ardent and somewhat aggressive piety, had built up a little chapel in a cupboard in that octagon parlour which we used to call the music room because in former days concerts used to be given there, and an old grand piano still stood there. It had been agreed among us that when Mélanie and Stephen were grown up they were to evangelise the savages, just as Bernard was to be an officer and win back Alsace and Lorraine, and Louise, the second sister, always generous, was to marry a champagne grower so that we might always drink as much as we chose of that sparkling golden wine to which we had never put our lips except on occasions of family festival. Thus the future was beautifully arranged for, except my own personal career which remained uncertain. Mélanie had been named for the little shepherdess of Dauphiny who at that time was much in people’s minds; the mystery of La Salette was talked of in guarded words. Sometimes I would ask her if she was not afraid of being eaten by cannibals, the existence of which had been revealed to me by my illustrated geography. Far from cooling her zeal, this frightful prospect simply warmed it. Stephen aspired no less ardently to martyrdom, notwithstanding that an unlucky adventure had happened to him in school: his comrades, admiring his devotion, had counted upon his performing a miracle on the day of his first communion, and the miracle not coming off, he was consequently held in some slight contempt.

I can never remember what sort of vespers or complines we used to say before the cupboard. The ceremonies consisted of hymns vociferated in chorus. Notwithstanding my tender years I was invited to share in these clerical manifestations. On that occasion we used to hold forth with all the energy of neophytes. Mélanie in particular would pitch her voice in its highest key, her piety being proportionate to the noise she made. Unluckily the music room was near grandfather’s chamber. All of a sudden, as we were at the utmost height of fervour, the door opened and grandfather appeared. He never used to pay much attention to us, though when we came within his visual angle he would look affably upon us. But this time he appeared to be greatly irritated. His dressing-gown flowing behind him, his Greek cap awry, his beard all disorder, gave him a fearsome aspect, greatly in contrast with his usual manner. He exclaimed harshly, “It’s impossible to have a moment’s peace in this house. Shut that cupboard, quick!”

We had disturbed his siesta, and his usually even temper was the worse for it. We hastily closed the cupboard. And we knew in that moment all the horror of arbitrary decrees and special laws. The devotion of Mélanie and Stephen was but increased, as always happens in time of persecution, but mine, less lively, or of younger growth, was cooled, I greatly fear.

Not long after it experienced another blow. In our town the Fête-Dieu was celebrated with incomparable pomp and display. People came from afar to take part in it. Where shall we have again such nobly imposing and magnificent spectacles? They have been replaced by gymnastic contests, or processions of mutual aid societies, the bad taste of which is heart-breaking. I pity the children of to-day who have never had opportunity to feel, amid popular acclamations and universal emotion, the imminent presence of God.

The town was divided in rivalry of its wayside altars; each quarter felt its reputation at stake. They were composed of moss and flowers, lilies, hortensias, geraniums and violets arranged in the form of a cross, or ingeniously combined in pious designs of a more complicated nature. All the gardens and groves were ruthlessly despoiled on their account. The finest one was always promoted to the terrace overshadowed by ancient trees that overlooked the lake.

When the morning came every window was watching the daybreak, imploring heaven for favourable weather. The streets were bordered with pines and larches which the peasants, on the previous evening or the one before that, had brought from the mountain in their ox-carts. Wreaths hung upon ribbons were thrown across the street like light cables above a stream, so that one walked about under hundreds of improvised triumphal arches. Here and there, the better to adorn the house fronts, some one had set out a table covered with a white cloth bearing pictures, vases, statuettes with a lamp, and had made ready baskets of roses for the refreshment of the angel battalion. In the poorest alleys the good wives set forth before their houses all their precious possessions, even to daguerreotypes of relatives, or their most artistically decorated caps, the better to honour the passing of the Holy Sacrament. Thus the entire town adorned itself, like a bride for her marriage.

Every one gathered before the church; the confraternities in costume with their banners, the brass band, their well polished instruments shining in the sunlight, the school children, girls and boys, the very smallest of them waving banners and all the population massed behind these official groups, all drawn up in good order. Then, upon the pavement before the church slowly advanced the sacred procession, while all the bells rang together; angels with wings of silver paper strewing the way with flower-petals drawn from little baskets suspended from their necks, clerks and sacristans in red cassocks, swinging censers whence arose blue smoke and a spicy odour, surpliced priests, canons in ermine rochets, and finally, upon a dais the colour of pure gold, or of ripe wheat, its four corners decorated with tufts of white plumes, escorted by four black-coated notables holding its cords, came Monsignor arrayed in a golden chasuble and bearing upon his breast the great golden monstrance.

It was a solemn moment, and yet there was one even more impressive. After having traversed the entire town, the procession would draw up for the last benediction upon the open place that forms a terrace above the lake, upheld by the walls of an ancient fortress. It would be near noon. The rays of the sun, falling directly upon the lake, were mirrored back, brightening all the colours, and flashing out in stars from every fleck of gold. Around the flower-decked altar the various bands were grouped, their standards all unfurled. Around these stood the soldiers in a large circle, the troops taking part for the last time in a religious ceremonial. They closed up, and at the command genou terre! they fell upon one knee, the officers waved their swords, and the clarions sounded loudly over all the fields. Many an old woman wept with joy as she prostrated herself, needing to see nothing more to know that God was there. Yet there was more; a priest, mounting upon a stool, drew the monstrance from its flower-decked niche and handed it to Monsignor, and the august officiant, lifting it high in air, traced above the great congregation the sign of the cross. The tremor with which I was at that moment shaken thrilled through the entire crowd, a great wave of emotion, such as reveals to a whole people that they are one in faith.

When I went home in my school-boy uniform I was still all a-thrill. Mother was waiting for me. She perceived what I had just been experiencing, and I saw tears rush to her eyes as she proudly kissed me. She, sacrificing herself, had not witnessed the ceremony. Some one must take care of the house and prepare for the guests who always came to us on that day. But she had come out and knelt before the door, hidden by the pines, when the procession went by. I had seen her through the branches. For a short moment she had united Mary’s part with that of Martha.

Father presently came home, warm and tired. He had had the honour of being chosen to hold one of the cords of the dais, and though he was bald, he had remained bareheaded, at the risk of a sunstroke.

“Dear wife!” he said simply, pressing mother to his heart. He had never given expression to his love for her before me, and that is why I remember this. He too was stirred with high enthusiasm.

Then came grandfather, smiling, spruce, his frock coat buttoned awry and his black hat a little on one side, but except for these minor matters dressed with almost irreproachable care.

“Well!” mother asked him in gentle triumph, “were you there this time?”

It appeared that in former years he had gone out for a walk and had not returned before evening. I had already perceived, from a thousand slight indications, that there was not absolute agreement in religious matters in our house and that the subject was usually avoided. Grandfather could not repress the little sardonic laugh which he seldom bestowed upon my mother:

“Superb, superb!” he said. “One might have thought oneself at the festival of the sun. The pagans could not have done it better.”

Mother’s face crimsoned. She turned and sent me away on some pretext of an errand. As I was going I heard my father’s clear voice:

“I beg you not to jest upon this subject before the children.”

And the sarcastic voice replying:

“But I am not jesting.”

In the street the nearest extemporised altar was already lying on the ground, like the useless shell of a firework. Everything had disappeared but the scaffoldings, crosses of flowers, moss. Candelabra had been hastily put under cover because of the threatening rain, for clouds had suddenly overspread the sky, and also because every one had gone home to dinner. My enthusiasm had fallen too, beneath a word of doubt.

At the Feast of the Epiphany every one had to imitate the acts of the king who had been designated by the bean. If he drank every one cried, “The king drinks,” and each one seized his glass. If the king began to laugh every one burst into laughter. Ought not a king to know when one should laugh and when he should keep his face straight?

III
THE ENEMIES

THERE was one Saturday evening, I remember....

I can not fix the precise date, but I know it must have been a Saturday because on coming home from school I met at the door Oui-oui, shaking his head, and Zeez Million counting the amount of her interest, on her open palm.

Saturday was the day for the poor. We usually watched the procession under shelter of a closed window, for Aunt Deen, who was a stickler for class distinctions, prudently kept us shielded from their verminous contact. Zeez, or Louise, was a crazy woman to whom was regularly given every week the modest subsidy of fifty centimes, which she called her interest. Insanity did not affect her exactions: a new servant, not sufficiently instructed having insulted her by doling out two sous, had received back the inadequate money in her face. Her reason had been affected by the expectation of a large prize in the lottery. She now spoke only of millions and the name had stuck by her.

As for Yes-yes, he owed the soubriquet to his nodding head, the weight of which he could ill sustain, and which incessantly wagged up and down like those articulated animals exhibited at bazars, their motions extolled by artful merchants by way of increasing their price. My sister Mélanie and I had incurred his wrath, under memorable circumstances. Mélanie having read in the gospels that a glass of water given to the poor would be paid back a hundred fold, conceived the idea of offering one to Oui-oui. In the goodness of her heart, she was even willing to let me participate in her beneficence. I held the caraffe, ready to offer a second draught. But he considered our gift an insult. Grandfather, when he heard of our ill-starred effort, completed our discomfiture:

“Offering water to that drunkard! He would rather never wash again than touch water.”

And in our presence he tendered to Oui-oui a glass of red wine, which was swallowed at a draught, followed by a second and a third till the entire bottle was gone. If grandfather was to receive back his offering a hundred fold, his thirst would be copiously quenched in the celestial kingdom.

Whenever grandfather, going out for his daily walk, met beggars at the door, he would desire that bread and not money should be given them.

“Money is immoral,” he would insist. “Let us share our bread with these good folk.”

I could not understand how money could be immoral. And we always found at the foot of the stone columns, broken into bits, all the bread that had been given, the poor having received it with contempt.

It must have been a Saturday in June. It was still broad day, though it was past seven o’clock when I came back to the house, and on the edge of the garden there was still a haycock which Tem Bossette must have mown, taking plenty of time. I just muttered, “How d’ye do, Yes-yes; how d’ye do, Zeez,” without so much as waiting for their reply; did not close the door which they had left open, and slipped into the passage that led to the kitchen, for I had lingered on the way home from school to play with some schoolmates in a narrow street that we called “behind the walls,” because it bordered a row of houses shut in like fortresses. I had no quarrel with this unsocial way of shutting every one out, though I preferred such fences or hedges as permit one to satisfy his curiosity, and do not so abruptly shut off the view; but grandfather, when he passed that way, never concealed his disgust. “The earth is for everybody, and they mew her up as if they feared she would run away!”

He spoke of it as of a living person. Except for our house I should have been quite willing to do away with all enclosures. Did not the earth belong to me?

“Behind the walls” we used to have great games of marbles in the very middle of the street, certain of not being disturbed. If a chance cart should enter the street, the driver, held up by our protests, would wait patiently until we had finished our game, sometimes he would even interest himself in the process; after which he would go on his way. Nobody was in a hurry in those days. At the present time that road is the Boulevard of the Constitution, and one has to look out for automobiles. I have no idea where children go to play now-a-days.

My haste was not due to fear of being scolded for being late. I was sure that no one had so much as thought of me. But merely by approaching the gate I had felt the strange uneasiness which at that time seemed to pervade the house like some formal guest whose presence makes every one feel ill at ease. Domestic tragedies make their approach felt long in advance by signs somewhat like those of a coming storm: a breathless atmosphere, intermittent showers of tears, the distant murmur of recriminations and laments. There was electricity in the air. My mother, who never failed to light her blessed candle as soon as thunder began to growl, was praying more often than ever, and I could see that she was anxious, for her pure eyes could never hide anything. Aunt Deen tore up and down stairs with feverish, almost war-like, ardour, inflamed with a rage that gave her an invincible strength, amazing The Hanged, and making those spiders that thought themselves just beyond reach suffer the ruthlessly avenging wolf’s head. She was continually uttering threats against invisible enemies. Ah! the wretches! They would soon know with whom they had to deal! “They” were certainly getting vigorous castigation in advance. Even our father, generally so self-controlled, appeared absorbed. At table he would sometimes throw back his head as if to drive away troublesome thoughts. And more than once I had perceived him conversing in a low voice with our mother, giving her documents on blue paper to read, the words of which I did not understand. Every one was on the alert for something to happen, perhaps a bulletin of victory or of disaster, such as comes to a country where the armies are on the frontier.

Alone among these secret parleyings, these evident anxieties, grandfather maintained the most complete indifference. Evidently the approaching event was no affair of his. He played the violin, smoked his pipe, consulted his barometer, inspected the sky, predicted the weather, as if nothing could be more important, and he went regularly for his walk. Nothing was changing, nothing could change for him except the clouds across the sun. As for things of earth, they were utterly without importance.

Once father attempted to ask his opinion, or present to him the peril of a situation which I could not in the least understand. His words were supplicating, moving, pathetic, yet full of a respect which in no degree lessened their emphasis. Eying on the floor with my school book I lost nothing of the conversation, instead of studying my lesson. But I could catch only detached words which by degrees filled me with terror: “careless administration,” “responsibility,” “mortgage,” “sentence,” “total ruin,” “auction,” and at last the terrifying conclusion, like the blow of a cane on my head.

“Then we must leave the house?”

Leave the house! I can still see grandfather lifting his arm wearily, as if to drive away a fly, letting it fall again as he replied with a great gentleness which at first deceived me as to his thought:

“Oh, as far as I am concerned, it’s all one whether we live in this house or in another”; adding with his everlasting little laugh:

“Ha, ha! when one hires a house one can ask for repairs. In one’s own house one never gets any.”

At that moment father perceived me. His eyes were so dreadful that I was terrified and broke out into gooseflesh; but he simply said, without raising his voice:

“Run away, child. This is no place for you.”

I ran away, stupefied with a gentleness that was in such contrast with his face. Now I recognise it as a witness to his tremendous mastery of himself. I rushed out into the garden, carrying, like a bomb under my arm, the formidable utterance, Whether we live in this house or another. The idea had never occurred to me, could never have come to me, that we could live in another house. I felt as if I had been witnessing a sacrilege, but at the same time the sacrilege found harbour in my brain because it had had no immediate sanction, had been accompanied by no solemnity, was like any indifferent act, like an act of no consequence at all. Was it possible that such words could have been uttered as a mere aside, negligently, even smilingly!

For the first time my notions of life were turned topsy-turvey. I confided my bewilderment to Tem Bossette, who was ruminating, leaning upon the handle of his spade. He lent me a complaisant ear, but took the opportunity to impart to me a bit of his personal history:

“I had a son in the hospital. When I saw that he was going to die, I rolled him up in a quilt and went away with my bundle. He died at home.”

I could not grasp the immediate applicability of his story, which he had told proudly, as if recalling an act of heroism. He shortly condescended to explain:

“It’s your lawsuit that is worrying them.”

Our lawsuit? We had a lawsuit? I had no idea what it was, and though I felt shame for my ignorance I asked the vinedresser:

“What is a lawsuit?”

He scratched his nose, no doubt in search of a definition.

“It’s something about justice. One loses, one wins, just as it happens. But when one loses it’s a great bother. On account of the sheriffs, who walk into your house as into a mill.”

The sheriffs were to walk into our house as into a mill! In an instant I pictured them under the guise of gigantic insects, enormous mole crickets swarming into the garden through the breach made by the chestnut tree, advancing in serried ranks to invest the house. I was particularly afraid of mole-crickets, which have a long clammy body and two antennae on the head, and enjoy a detestable reputation in agricultural circles: all sorts of misdeeds are attributed to them—they ravage whole garden beds. I had actually seen some crawling through the breach, and in the face of their invasion not all the arms manufactured by Tem Bossette sufficed to reassure me. I had turned tail, so to speak, upon my riding pole.

“It’s all Monsieur’s fault,” concluded the labourer, upon whose heart the affair hung heavy. “But what will you have? He doesn’t care for anything, and when one doesn’t care for anything nothing goes right. It’s lucky there’s Master Michael.”

Then, on one side there were the mole-crickets and on the other there was my father. A fearsome battle was to take place of which the house was the stake. And during the battle grandfather, indifferent, would be looking in the air, according to his custom, to see which way the wind blew. Up to that time I had supposed that, like the sluggard kings, he had nothing to do, but behold, he could bring about catastrophes! With one word he could close chapels, belittle ancestral portraits, and above all, it was quite the same to him to live in one house as in another! Why not in a roulotte, one of those waggon houses overflowing with bronzed gipsies, such as I had seen passing the gate, to the great terror of Aunt Deen, who used to call us in hastily, and give orders to bolt all the doors and look after the vegetables and fruits.

I was going in, greatly depressed by this conversation when I ran against Aunt Deen herself, whose assistance had been invoked by The Hanged for some arduous task requiring nerve and muscle.

“The lawsuit,” I cried, by way of relieving my mind. She stopped short.

“Who has been talking to you?”

“Tem Rossette.”

“That fellow must be sent away. Beatrix and Pachoux will have to do by themselves.”

She did not count herself. She simply called Beatrix by his right name.

Did she perceive from my tone or my face the inward tragedy through which I was passing? She shook me, laughing:

“Child, when your father is here, there is never anything to be afraid of—do you hear?”

And I was at once consoled.

She was already hastening after the labourer with a ball of red string in her hand which Mariette had doubtless refused to intrust to him. As she went she tossed her head proudly, like a horse that snuffs the wind and I heard her muttering to herself.

“Well, I declare, if that isn’t the last drop!”

By what signs, that Saturday evening, did I discern that the battle had been fought, that we were only waiting to learn the result? In the kitchen there was no Mariette over the stove. She was debating, vehemently, with Philomena, the waitress, who was carrying the soup tureen all awry, at great risk of spilling its contents, and with my old friend Tem, redder even than usual, who was doing his best to reassure the household by a word of prophecy.

“No, no, things will go well. To begin with, for my part, I will not leave the garden.”

As soon as they saw me there was silence, and Mariette quickly recovered her usual coolness and began to scold me.

“You are late, Master Francis. The second bell has rung. You will be scolded.” And to Philomena:

“Why are you standing there like a stock?”

Thus were we dispersed. I was counting upon meeting Aunt Deen in the vestibule before the dining-room; she was always the last to come to table because on the way she would find thirty-six different things to be begun or finished, and dash upstairs and down an indefinite number of times. My tactics succeeded. To forestall inquiry I took the offensive:

“What about the lawsuit?”

“Hush; we are waiting to hear.”

“To hear what?”

“It is being decided to-day in the Court.”

She uttered the words “The Court” with instructive stateliness, that reminded me of the Court of the Emperor Charlemagne, in my history book. A grand personage, a king with a golden crown on his head and wearing a golden chasuble like Monsignor the bishop in the procession, was concerning himself with our matter. It was awe-inspiring but flattering.

Under Aunt Deen’s shadow I slipped into my seat, endeavouring to put on a natural air. In the spirit of good fellowship my brothers and sisters refrained from calling attention to my arrival, so that I could swallow my soup without being noticed. Usually our mother came into the dining-room before us, to serve the soup. Philomena’s loquacity had interfered with this preliminary operation and I reaped the benefit of it. In fact, my parents paid not the slightest attention to me, from which I could infer that something was going on. I hastily gulped down my food, and my plate emptied, I cast a comprehensive glance around the table.

In the seat of honour, grandfather, the reigning king, was leaning over the table in order to drop no soup upon his beard, the precaution evidently quite absorbing him. I should learn nothing from him; nor anything more from my father, who commanded the table from one of the corners, and whose glance made me drop my eyes, for I could see distinctly that he was aware of my fault. After having inquired of one another as to his occupations during the day, he tried to make the conversation general. But he was almost the only one who spoke. His calm, his cheerfulness, soon completely restored the confidence which two or three spoonfuls of warm soup had already begun to awaken in me. Aunt Deen, who could not remain inactive during the intervals of the service, was busying herself in advance by mixing the salad, which she considered her special function, although there had often been some talk of withdrawing it from her because of her prodigality in the matter of vinegar. She tossed the green leaves and muttered vague exorcisms against bad luck. My sister Louise was teasing the little priest, the absent-minded Stephen, whom one might serve indefinitely with the same dish. But Bernard and Mélanie, the two eldest, often turned their eyes in one direction, and mine followed them: they were looking at our mother and our mother was looking at our father, upon whom in this hour all our safety seemed to depend.

The lamp had been lighted but it was not yet dark out of doors. Only the trees seemed to draw nearer, their branches to grow thicker and to cast a deeper shadow. Through the open windows a fresh breeze came from the garden, bringing on its wings pellmell, the odour of flowers, and a cloud of night-moths, which, attracted by the light, wheeled about under the lamp shade. I watched their flight, at times more deeply interested in them than in the disturbed expression of the faces around the table.

The meal was drawing to a close; the dessert was already being served. I had begun to think that nothing was going to happen. Suddenly Mariette rushed into the dining-room, a telegram in her hand. She had not waited to put it on a tray, she had not given it to the maid who served at table, but brought it in person just as she had received it from the postman. She, too, scented important news in the air, and would learn what it was without delay.

“It is for Monsieur Rambert,” she said.

She passed by grandfather’s place, and crossed the entire length of the room, as if she was but doing her duty in handing the blue paper to father, who was on the side toward the windows. Father took it from her, but handed it at once to the actual addressee.

“Do you want it?” he asked.

“Oh, no thank you,” said grandfather with his little laugh. “Open it yourself.”

Nevertheless I caught him casting a quick, alert glance upon the telegram. His little laugh at once recalled to my mind a rattle which had been taken away from me because it disturbed everybody. That little laugh was the last sound. An almost solemn silence ensued, so complete that I could hear the tearing of the envelope. How could father open it with so little impatience? I imagined myself opening it in his place, err—err ... it was done. All eyes converged upon the deliberate motions of his two hands—all except those of grandfather, who quite as peacefully removed the crust from a bit of cheese, and seemed to take pleasure in the trifling task. Father felt our anxiety and doubtless wished to relieve it at all hazards; instead of reading he raised his eyes to us.

“Go on eating,” he said. “It does not concern you.”

Then turning to the cook who had remained behind his chair, leaning over like an interrogation point:

“Thank you, Mariette, you may go.”

She went, vexed, knowing nothing, but sent in Philomena who learned no more than she.

Finally my father read. Deliberate as he had been in the preliminaries he was quick enough in reading. He must have taken in the whole at a glance. He was already putting the telegram in his pocket without a word, without the movement of a muscle, when he looked around the table, and under his gaze we bent our eyes upon our plates.

“Come, come, children!” he exclaimed almost gaily. “It is still light. Make haste to finish your dessert and run play in the garden.”

He spoke in his usual tone, at once cheery and commanding. It was so simple that for a moment our mother quite brightened up. I saw that as I raised my head, but it was only for a moment, like the afterglow upon the mountain tops after sunset. Then the shadow again swept over her face, and I even saw in her eyes two water drops that glistened and disappeared without falling. She had understood, and after her and by her I understood, too. The mysterious Court had decided against us. The lawsuit, the terrible lawsuit, was lost.

We were all in consternation without knowing precisely why; we had felt the wind of defeat pass over us.

Still, our father manifested no trouble, no sadness, and grandfather after his gruyère was dipping his biscuit in his wine, as he particularly liked to do because of his teeth, which were bad. He seemed to have paid no attention to the affair of the telegram. The nerve of the one amazed me as much as the aloofness of the other. By different ways they had reached the same calmness. As for Aunt Deen, she was biting viciously into a peach which was unripe and crackled.

We left the table and went into the garden into which darkness was stealthily creeping. I tried to linger behind, but was drawn along by my sister Mélanie; she divined that our parents wished to talk by themselves.

I could find no pleasure in any play, and I was soon flocking by myself, my imagination revelling over the approaching ruin. “They” were driving us from our house as the angel drove Adam and Eve out of Eden. “They” were coming into our house as into a mill. “They” were dividing our treasures among themselves as the Greeks divided the spoils of the Trojans. “They?” Who? Aunt Deen’s “they”; I knew no more than that. And in this catastrophe one remark kept coming back to me, incomprehensible, terrifying, and yet not to be put away: What’s the difference whether one lives in one house or in another?

These words of my grandfather, revolting and at the same time stupefying, almost mesmerized me by their audacity, almost made me giddy. How could one consent to abandon his house without defending it to his utmost ability? In my heart I cried to arms. By way of acting out what was going on within me, I seized one of Tem Bossette’s swords, bestrode my favourite pole, and notwithstanding the rapid approach of darkness, extinguishing the last rays of twilight, of which I was greatly in dread, I rushed at a gallop to the very top of the garden, to the chestnut grove, to the breach in the wall. The shadow of night had already entered by it, and after it all the shadows. They were creeping along, climbing the trees, swarming over the paths, filling the clumps of trees. There was a whole army of them. They were the mole-crickets, giant mole-crickets, the enemies of the house. With all my might I tried to scatter them to right and left with great sword thrusts. But I met nothing, and that was the worst of it. Then, in desperation, I took to my heels. I was conquered.

It was a comfort to hear a voice coming my way, my mother’s voice calling,

“François, François!”

That call saved my honour; my hasty return ceased to be a flight.

My bedroom, the vast proportions of which distressed me, but which happily I shared with Bernard and Stephen, was near our mother’s chamber. It was long before I could sleep. Beneath the door of communication I could perceive a streak of light. The lamp must have burned very late and I could hear the alternating sound of two carefully subdued voices,—my father’s and my mother’s voices. With all calmness the destiny of the family was being discussed close beside me.

IV
THE TREATY

WHEN one is a child one imagines that events are going to rush one upon another like the two opposite camps of a game of prison-bars. The next morning I expected something extraordinary to happen, the first result of which would be a holiday from school. Surely no one would work when the house was threatened! I was astonished on being called at the usual hour, when I was settling myself to make up my lost sleep, and sent to school just as usual. Stephen, always absent minded and absorbed in his prayers, had noticed nothing. But Bernard, the eldest, appeared to me to lack his usual high spirits; no doubt he considered me too young to share his dejection. None of us exchanged any confidences on the way to school.

This silence was the beginning of forgetting. I soon recovered from the alarm of the preceding evening, and very soon, as we continued to live in the house, I concluded that our enemies had beat an unexpected retreat.

“They wouldn’t dare,” Aunt Deen had declared.

Nevertheless, a few days later, happening to be in mother’s room, she received a visit from her dressmaker, a maiden of a certain age with mahogany coloured hair, such as I have never seen on any other head. Mother excused herself for having summoned her for so small a matter, simply a making-over, and not a new gown.

“When one has seven children,” she added prettily, “one must be reasonable. And besides I am no longer very young.”

“Madame is always young and beautiful,” protested the artist.

From my corner I considered this protest misplaced. Neither the age nor the face of my mother belonged to this lady of the mahogany hair, but well and duly to me and my brothers and sisters. Whether she was pretty or ugly, young or old, concerned us alone.

“So,” concluded my mother, “here is a gown which you can easily alter a little. You are so clever.”

“Madame has worn it a good deal already.”

“Precisely, I am attached to it.”

This time I thought the dressmaker was right, in putting on a disdainful air as she accepted the work so unworthy of her. Without question the gown in question had been often worn.

At the moment I saw no connection between this episode and our domestic drama. My mother would always be beautiful enough, and clothes could make no difference. Family discussions, however, usually took place in the octagon parlour, which could only be entered by passing through our bedroom. It was quite isolated, and one could be sure of not being interrupted. We hardly ever went there except for our music lessons, since the cupboard chapel had been put out of commission.

It was there that I had lost my faith in the Christmas miracle. It is true that grandfather’s dry laugh, whenever the descent of the little Jesus was anticipated, had prepared me for incredulity. The morning of the festival day desired and expected by all children, we used to find in this room a pine tree, its branches bent down under the weight of toys, and lighted up by blue and pink candles. At the foot of the tree a wax baby would be lying upon straw, holding out to us his little arms. The ox and the ass were there, too, but the child was larger than they. Their smaller proportions simply put them in their proper place of subordination. Without seeking to penetrate the mystery I always supposed that the tree grew there of itself during the night, with all the strange fruits, which were quite enough to distract my curiosity. But on the night of December 24, lying awake from curiosity, I saw my father and mother pass through the room, walking on tiptoe, only in old houses there are always planks that cry out and betray the presence of people. It even happens that they cry out when no one is there, as if they were supporting invisible persons, the steps of all those who had trodden upon them while living. My parents were laden with all sorts of packages. From that time I understood their collaboration with the little Jesus.

Now, I again believe in the miracle, though like Jesus himself it descended from heaven upon the earth. It was a miracle of love.

How did our father and mother manage to realise at one time all the dreams of our excited imaginations and distribute to each one the paradisaical things that he longed for? How, above all, did they manage to diminish nothing from the divine generosity which they represented during the sorrowful times that we were soon to know? My wonder never ceases when I see, on Christmas day, in the quarters where the poor live, children running about with their hands full of gifts. They are only cheap little toys, but they bear in themselves the virtue of a miracle....

Of the secret consultations in the music room, notwithstanding its remarkable acoustic properties, I could hear nothing. Neither of the two spoke above a low murmur: they were always of one mind. Yet I divined that they were talking of the lawsuit. Something serious was lurking in the darkness. Preparations were being made to repel the enemy. And I wondered why the enemy did not make his appearance.

One morning—it was a Thursday—as we came home for the midday breakfast, my brothers and I, what was our stupefaction, our horror, on perceiving on one of the stone columns into which the entrance gates were set, an enormous bill, which bore the outrageous inscription:

VILLA FOR SALE

We looked at one another, all alike indignant.

“It’s an insult!” exclaimed Bernard, who already had a sense of military honour.

“No, it’s a mistake,” affirmed Stephen, with unbounded amazement.

Absent-minded and unobservant, he had not for one moment reflected upon the trifling incidents which Bernard and I had been observing, and which, inspiring us with a holy horror, had prepared us for this catastrophe.

We should not have felt more overcome with shame if we had all three been slapped in the face. Bernard, the boldest of us, tried to tear down the bill, but it was glued fast and resisted the attempt. Like a reinforcing army we rushed into the besieged house, which I expected to find full of mole-crickets. The first person we met was Aunt Deen, gesticulating and talking to herself. We had hardly opened our lips when she perceived our agitation and at once her fury put ours into the shade.

“Yes, they want to rob us of everything! They propose to take possession of our property. I would rather have died than live to see this.”

On her lips the word property took on a solemn grandeur. Then they had passed through the breach; they were advancing upon us in serried ranks. Beyond this assurance it was needless to expect anything more intelligible from Aunt Deen.

We turned for further explanation to grandfather, coming in from his walk. He waved us off with a gesture of superb indifference; he seemed to us to be soaring in a region far above our agitations. Had he not declared that it was all one to him whether he lived in one house or another? He had been out for a walk on this fine July morning, when the whole sunny country-side seemed swimming in light; he looked healthy, radiant; why should he permit us to spoil his pleasure by inopportune remarks? On the contrary he proposed to share some of his pleasure with us.

“I love this good summer sun,” he said. “And no one can rob us of it.”

His remark was not calculated to quiet our alarm. Its singularity struck me: in such a moment as this, when all our combative energies were not enough to resist the danger that hung over us, he would draw our attention to a simple source of happiness which had no lawful owner and was beyond attack. When one is a child one never thinks that the sun is something he may enjoy.

Mother was clasping my two elder sisters in her arms, trying to console them and not succeeding, for she shared their sorrow. At her feet the two little ones, Nicola and Jamie, were lamenting themselves indiscriminately. Imagine the effect upon us of this weeping group! Even Louise, the laughing Louise, was abandoning herself to tears.

“Here comes your father,” suddenly exclaimed mamma. “Stop crying, I beg of you. He has trouble enough already.”

She had been the first to hear his step. The effect of her words was instantaneous. We all controlled ourselves as quickly as we could, and went down to the dining-room with faces in good order.

At table The Father began to be absorbed in his thoughts, the course of which we followed. We used to call him the father among ourselves, as we used to say the house. Did he see the anxiety in all those faces turned toward him? Did he read in our eyes the dishonouring inscription, Villa for sale? He looked us full in the face one by one and his frank smile reassured us. Come! He still had his air as of the chief who commands. We had the feeling that he could not consent to such a downfall. Peace and appetite returned to us at the same time, and seldom was luncheon more gay than this one. We enjoyed the relief to our strained nerves, under the shelter of that protecting strength.

After the meal, while my brothers, whose studies were already of importance, completed a task, I ran into the garden; the afternoon was mine. The figure of Tem Bossette emerged from the vines. I went to him. He was tying the too luxuriant branches to poles with bands of straw, but he asked nothing better than to interrupt his work which, to judge by the number of branches already tied, was not making much headway. An empty bottle at his feet bore witness to the obstinate struggle against the heat which he had maintained.

He evidently saw my approach with satisfaction. I could hear from a distance his hoarse voice muttering to himself like Aunt Deen. At a later time I understood better the secret reason of his indignation. He was acknowledging to himself, not being as stupid as Mimi Pachoux, his rival, insisted, that his whims and his drink habits would make him of no use anywhere else; his destiny was closely allied with the destiny of the house. So he lost none of his rage and did not cease to lift up his head, his great pumpkin shaped head, against the reigning king, whose idleness, whose home and foreign politics and above all, whose financial condition he never ceased to deplore. As soon as I was near enough to hear him, he put into words the griefs which were obscurely struggling within him:

“You have read the bill, Master Francis?”

“To be sure I have read it.”

And I added, bitter with family pride,

“What is that to you?”

The question suffocated him. His eyes started from his head. “To me? To me?” he exclaimed, foaming at the mouth with fury.